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The Trouble With Hand Counting

Updated Nov. 17, 2000 12:02 a.m. ET

Florida's Supreme Court yesterday approved manual recounts of ballots in the state's counties. This decision will no doubt be used to assert that manual counting is the gold standard of accurately determining an election result. The notion seems to be that if you let individuals look at the ballots and record what they see, the result will be as accurate as knowing that a playing card with the number 2 and two red hearts on it is in fact the two of hearts. This is not true. Hand counting is not as infallible as cable news viewers are being led to believe. The problems with hand counting are very well known to...